Dialogue on Emergent Capitalism and Epistemics
Here’s a conversation which I wanted to save so I could refer back to. Thought I might as well share it.
We’re referencing this interview with Nick Land, who might be described as an evil genius.
Santiago Ferris: He makes a good point about how every single time environmentally minded people sit down and try to predict the course of capitalism, they come up with very short-term end-of-the-world scenarios. But capitalism escalates not just quantitatively but unpredictably qualitatively and finds its lines of flight from its logically predicted future wall. I like the idea that capitalism’s solutions to escaping death are actually qualitative, ergo creative, and impossible to predict.
Satya: Curious to hear more about that.
Santiago Ferris: I love that he sees capitalism as a concrete thing with its own particular goals that are completely ahuman—body without organs. Seeing it this way unlocks avenues of experimentation. You can imagine things that are like capitalism that work similarly but to different ends. I wonder if what you really need to ‘understand’ capitalism is to identify and cross-study individual qualitative mutations.
Satya: Yes, sounds cool but needs convincing. This kind of thing annoys me. It’s a cool, creative idea, but I don’t have any reason to believe it’s actually true. And if he just says it and is like “if you get it, you get it,” that’s not very epistemically productive.
Santiago Ferris: Well, let’s pick it apart. I don’t think capitalism is driven systematically and efficiently by human agents. It’s just too easy to be a capitalist, and yet it seems to have direction, an arrowness. It seems possible to me that the emergence of a completely unlike thing would happen. It also seems clear that what we think of as ‘accelerating’ is not really just the accumulation of capital. You can’t actually explain stuff like the atomic bomb purely in terms of the accumulation of money.
Satya: Yes, agreed 100%. Also, the emergence certainly seems possible—I just am not sure if it is true or not.
Santiago Ferris: Right. But even if you don’t think he's being dialectical, I still think it’s epistemically productive. Because it shows you that capitalism could be a particular type of thing with a particular nature. Just that idea is productive to have and, in my opinion, the hallmark of valuable knowledge—or simply ideas—that it lends itself to experimentation, demystification, etc.
Satya: How does science work? When does testing a model actually help? How do you know if it’s just a coincidence that your model happened to be right? The easy ways to falsify it don’t work, but it’s very wrong—just hard to see that it’s wrong.
Santiago Ferris: Meaningful experimentation does not necessarily always fit into the scientific method. There are kinds of things that simply outrun it—e.g., books. “As you approach singularity, it becomes obvious that the causal arrow is heading in the opposite direction.”
Satya: Sure, but I’m asking a different question. How do you ever distinguish? The theory-practice gap or the map-territory gap is so huge with something like capitalism. The emergence idea can still be interesting and useful, but you can’t ever have justified confidence in it.
Santiago Ferris: I think making up confidence can sometimes be useful. We obviously can’t always be tethered by empirical truth. Fickle thing to motivate experimentation.
